I write about innovation, careers,and unforgettable personalities. My Forbes magazine cover stories have analyzed Sequoia Capital, LinkedIn, Amazon and Hewlett-Packard. In 1997, while at The Wall Street Journal, I shared in a Pulitzer Prize for national reporting. Along the way, I've written four books: "Merchants of Debt," "Health Against Wealth," "Perfect Enough" and "The Rare Find." Contact me anytime at GCAForbes@gmail.com

Qualtrics' Killer Apps For Work: Say Hi To Bain's 'Net Promoter'

Digital app stores — run by the likes of Apple and Google — have become the irresistible way for consumers to grab nifty new services. Do corporate types deserve their own app store, too? Qualtrics says yes. The online-survey specialist has created an easy-to-shop innovation exchange that looks just like an app store, while offering business users such delights as free access to Bain’s Net Promoter System for gauging customer feedback.

Qualtrics’s ebullient founder and chief executive officer, Ryan Smith, vows that his innovation exchange will be “like the iTunes of data collection and research.” Qualtrics on its own currently provides online-survey templates and data-collection systems that are used by thousands of businesses and academic institutions. But rather than build everything itself, Provo, Utah-based Qualtrics is eager to connect its customers to other tools that can help make surveys more effective.

In best app-store tradition, Qualtrics is offering everything from doodads to business mainstays. Among Qualtrics’ lighter offerings are a “visually intuitive slider” designed by Ideo, and a (still-under-construction) zombie apocalypse survey. Super-serious apps include tie-ins to data-analytics systems offered by the likes of Adobe, Deloitte, mySQL and SAS. But the most attention-getting entry is likely to be Qualtrics’ pipeline into Bain’s Net Promoter System.

(Photo credit: Robert S. Donovan)

Across dozens of industries, customer research has been upended by a bone-simple idea promulgated by Bain partner Fred Reichheld in 2003. At that time, customer research was getting too complicated for its own good, he argued. He contended that companies could get the key insights they wanted by posing just two questions: “Would you recommend this to a friend?” and “Why?”

Such streamlined surveys have been adopted by companies ranging from Delta Airlines to Facebook. Companies create a net-promoter score by adding up the percentages of people who are eager to recommend their services — and then subtracting the percentage of respondents who aren’t inclined to recommend at all. High scores indicate strong customer loyalty; low or negative scores indicate something is off track.

Even without any formal Bain alliance, Qualtrics discovered last year that legions of its users were running some variant of net promoter surveys on their own. “We had 138,000 net-promoter surveys on Qualtrics,” Smith said. “But it had kind of gone rogue.” Survey designs were subject to so many minor variations that it was impossible to compare results across companies. As a result, Bain officials and Qualtrics partnerships specialist Kylan Lundeen last autumn began developing ways to work more closely together.

In its app store, Qualtrics is offering users the chance to see how their NPS scores match up against peers in their own industry. That’s useful, because a disappointing score for a luxury hotel may still represent a strong showing in a different field such as discount tire sales, where pampering is less common and frustrations run higher.

In its announcement of the Bain alliance, Qualtrics is talking up the fact that it will provide free access to Bain’s survey-design expertise, through “a Bain-certified NPS wizard.” But Qualtrics is hardly abandoning its efforts to make money via its surveys. Qualtrics CEO Smith says that while anyone using this new tool can conduct 1,000 responses at no charge, the pay meter will go on if respondents want to collect additional responses.

Given that NPS etiquette generally calls for repeated surveys every few months — or at least every year — odds are that most Qualtrics users of the new services will end up in the paying-customer camp before long.

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Hi Alex: Thanks for posting, though I’m not quite sure what’s bugging you. Qualtrics strikes me as an interesting company, so I write about them periodically. I do get paid by Forbes (this is normal) … and I don’t get paid by Qualtrics or anyone associated with them (this is normal, too.)

If you’ve got a different point of view on Qualtrics, please feel free to elaborate. As long as the dialogue is halfway civil and informative, I welcome the debate.